


there’s another life (beyond the lie)

by fleuresty



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Timelines, Book: The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands, Eddie Kaspbrak Lives, F/M, Fix-It, Gen, M/M, Partially canon-compliant, Post-IT Chapter Two (2019), Stanley Uris Lives, The Turtle CAN Help Us (IT), for that matter georgie and adrian live too but i didn't get that far into it, plot partially ripped from the dark tower sorry, this is a vehicle for an extended metaphor about a parking lot but trust me
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-23
Updated: 2020-06-26
Packaged: 2021-03-01 04:49:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 13,764
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23289538
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fleuresty/pseuds/fleuresty
Summary: “It's like this: there's a single track from the time we were kids until we came back to Derry. And then it splits.” Richie holds up two fingers, first together, then in a V. “There's a version where it happened like it happened,” he holds up his index finger, “and a version where – where it didn't.”After Derry, Richie remembers what happened, in stunning clarity. The problem is that he remembers too much, and not just too much - too many versions, so many that he thinks his head may split open. And there's nothing to do but do something about it.(Featuring some plot points lovingly ripped out of The Dark Tower.)
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak & The Losers Club, Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier, Patricia Blum Uris/Stanley Uris, The Losers Club & Stanley Uris
Comments: 6
Kudos: 15





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The facts were these: In 2011, I was reluctantly introduced to The Dark Tower. This was my first major foray into Stephen King's writing other than Misery and it completely wrecked my life. (I still have yet to finish another full-length SK book, including IT. I cannot bring myself to apologize for this.) In 2016 and 2019, I went to see the IT movies in the theater with some of my best friends and did Not intend to come out of it the only one with a diehard need to protect the Losers, but here we are, ripping off the plot of the first half of The Waste Lands as payback for the months I spent on The Dark Tower. I regret only some things.
> 
> A couple of warnings, before we start: This IS a fix-it of movie canon. It will be okay in the end, but Eddie and Stan are both dead for at least a little while. Mentions are not particularly graphic, but there is some light discussion of the manner Eddie's death and the emotional circumstances of Stan's suicide. Also, there's some discussion of Richie and Eddie both having some struggles with their perception of reality, but again, I tried to give you the shape of it without making it too intense. Please proceed with caution and take care of yourselves. Let me know if I need to tag for anything additional or include any other warnings, and drop a comment or come get me on [twitter](https://www.twitter.com/fortheworlds) if you'd like to discuss any other warnings before you dive in.
> 
> (Also I’m having computer trouble and am posting this from my phone so if anything looks haywire let me know.)

It is 11:59 p.m., which is a deeply ridiculous time to be rolling over and jamming dirty glasses (how? They'd been clean when he took them off) onto his face – but here he is. It's cold with the sun down, for all that the days were nice enough, and the rain hangs heavy. Richie doesn't register the drum of it after his eyes focus; even with the glasses, things are still blurred with uneasy sleep. Maine doesn't sit so well with him anymore.

He's not going out in the rain, despite the part of him that wants to go out to The Barrens and just _sit_ in it, so downstairs seems the next best option. Richie is surprised, but not disappointed, to catch sight of Bill and Mike both sitting in the bar of the inn they'd apparently commandeered over the last few days. Before he can even speak, before either of them have to turn and look at him, Mike is sliding a matching bourbon over to Richie's waiting hand.

Among other things, they're still reeling from all the utter bullshit they'd been through in the last 24 hours – less than.

“Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world,” Mike starts, apropos of nothing. He doesn't finish, just lets the words hang in the slightly misty (misty?) air. Richie does a double-take at the door, to see maybe if it’s standing open; but no, closed tight. He can see the deadbolt locked if he cranes his neck.

Richie picks up the glass but doesn't bring it to his mouth. “Tell you the fuck what,” he mutters. “I'm about fuckin' sick of this place.”

Mike lets out a strangled laugh. “You and me both, Rich.”

“Where's Bev and Ben?”

“S-still asleep,” Bill tells him. “The others, t-too.” 

They all start at that; Richie nearly drops the drink, but not until a second too late. It seemed so normal when he said it, because of course Stan and Eddie were upstairs asleep, not dead and dead and dead and still somehow alive.

“Sorry. I,” Bill says. “B-Bev and Ben are upstairs. I think they took a minute to get their shit together after we got back here.”

Richie blinks, adjusts the glass in his hand. He doesn't talk about the way the cognitive dissonance is lingering after Bill's slip up, digging fingers into his guts and his brain like something trying to claw its way back out – or in. “Good,” he says instead, finally taking a drink. “They deserve it.”

Mike and Bill both hum, agreeing with him, but say no more. In the silence, Richie finds himself mulling over the shock still rattling around his core, hung up on what Bill said. He _feels_ it, a hard stop in his memory, a flat wall on the track of his thoughts. It weighs on him, like any solid brick structure rightfully should. 

Richie's not sure he likes how well all of these metaphors are fitting.

Mike sets down an empty glass, and Bill's goes on the bar in short order. They bid him goodnight, and Richie tosses back the rest of the bourbon before following his friends.

“Hey?” They turn and look at him. “I love you guys. Goodnight.”

Mike smiles, and Bill's eyes go soft around the corners.

“Love you too, Rich.” “Goodnight, man, love you too.”

That was the thing Richie liked best about the Losers. There was really nothing to be sheepish about saying, not after the shitshow in '89 and the _clusterfuck_ this week and the years – endless if not, strictly speaking, countless – between them.

It was good to have your eternal, cosmically bound group of friends brought together by universe-bending love. Helped offset the brain-melting trauma.

But lying in bed, his thoughts move away from the ironclad reassurance of his friends' love and circles again back to the brick on the track, the wall separating him from something big, something that's blocking a whole section of his brain. Richie thinks about fear, and about love, and about all the bullshit since since 19-fucking-89, and he's had it. Eyes closed, he pictures the track. The wall. The thing blocking and the thing – things – blocked. Almost, almost, he can feel it, the old, smooth brick too well-established for how new it feels. It's frustrating in its permanence, and, in his frustration, he touches

just

one

brick—

The whole thing crumbles.

The wall blocking the natural course of his memories turns to dust, and what was only moments before a grief-hazed recollection of the last couple of days fractures. The brick explodes in his brain and in the last moments of cognizance, Richie flinches, a last-ditch effort to avoid breathing in all that dust, from getting all that clay in his lungs. It doesn’t work, not really, and the dust settles all over him. 

He wakes up feeling gritty in the morning, and when he drags himself out of bed, joints popping to beat the band, he feels just that much older.

It's a relatively glorious day in New York City – it's summer, and the concrete and steel stinks to high heaven, but the sun is high and the sky is clear. The traffic sucks. All is right with the world, except for the part where Eddie is miserable, agitated, certain that there's something he's forgetting, missing, but miles and miles off from taking it into his hand. He flips out on Myra in traffic, almost calls her “Mommy,” catches himself because _what_? 

He keeps expecting the phone to ring, somehow. It should have rung by now, but he's not expecting a call. It should have rung by now. Mike was supposed to call him.

… Who the fuck, though? He can't remember knowing anyone named Mike, but. It's Mike who should have called. 

He's pulled out of his thoughts just in time to slow for the stoplight.

It nags at him through the rest of the day, through meetings and cases and all the way through dinner, when he puts off Myra on grounds of working late and picks up Chinese food. It feels like the thing to do; Eddie can't remember the last time he had Chinese food.

Something is wrong. It still tugs at his brain, like rolling too far the wrong way with an IV in your arm. The next morning, he pushes that feeling down – and for the most part, it works, and the weirdness that hung over his head one day is gone the next, not dissipated like morning fog on the river but shoved back into its box where Eddie no longer has to think about it.

But a couple days later. Jesus. It's like a fucking Jack-in-the-box, _boom, oof_ , and his fucking chest hurts, as though someone had attempted to put a telephone pole through it. And that's how he knows, he _knows_ , that something is fucking wrong. His mind is wrong, the whole thing is written wrong, and Eddie knows, _knows_ , that he should be fucking dead right now.

That one is a hard night. He lies there in bed and listens to the traffic outside, and when he finally drifts off, he's lost in the fog as it rolls off the Hudson.

Life is already so goddamn weird, it may as well happen, be damned whatever muck makes up the river.

In his dream, there's a knocking from below the streets, a ghostly voice that drifts out of the storm drains and the manhole covers. He can't tell what it's saying, not even if he gets down – an awareness in his brain screaming about the filth of the streets even though in dreams it won't matter – to press an ear to the lingering warmth of the pavement as night falls. The fog doesn't let up – the voice doesn't let up – Eddie doesn't get up, dreaming and for the first time in days feeling like things make sense though they're rather more tangled than ever. One of the manhole covers materializes beneath his cheek, and, driven by the same impulse telling him his memories are liars, he 

knocks 

back

against it,

listening to the echo sink down, down, down, and float back up, up, up,

but it isn't coming back the same as it went. This time, for the first time, he can almost hear it whimpering his name, then screaming it, broken up by the jags of the caverns beneath Neibolt Street and swallowed by them as the whole place collapses.

He doesn't realize until he wakes up that he can picture the house, the cave, all of it – but has no fucking clue where it is.

(The daylight is blinding when they all tumble out of the house on Neibolt Street, just before the ground opens its maw and swallows the last trace of the killer _fucking_ clown.

They're grabbing for each other, fingers catching hems and arms and other hands. Bev's are still slippery with all of that blood. Bill can feel his own shaking as he throws an arm around Richie's waist and nearly shreds Mike's sleeve in a vise grip. The Losers wait, panting, coughing the last of the dust from their lungs, each afraid to speak for fear that some other fucking thing goes wrong and It erupts back out of the ground.

At long, long last, the dust settles. The last boards of the decrepit house tumble into the abyss, and then:

“Shit,” Stan breathes. “Shit, I gotta call Patty.”)

There's a sign in the gravel drive that Richie knows used to read “RESERVED PARKING FOR THE WORLDS GREATEST GRANDPA.” He never knew who the grandpa was, but the majority of the sign has long since been shot to hell – it reads 

**RESERVED**

**PARKING**

**FOR THE**

**WORLDS**

now, and it's that much more unsettling that the bad punctuation works better now. The worlds that what? That crumble below his feet? That split and branch what feels endlessly, that cover different worlds for the different lengths of every breath he's taken since he got back to Derry, since he stayed to kill the fucking clown, since he tumbled back onto Neibolt Street while, yes, worlds crumbled below his feet, literally and not so much.

If he stops in this stranger's drive, kicks away the gravel, sorts through all the valet keys, does Eddie come back? Does Stan? If he could just find the right _fucking_ key. Richie's never seriously contemplated grand theft auto before, but he can feel an itch in his fingers just the same.

Which is, of course, totally ridiculous. He goes back to his walk instead. It's too early for any other miserable bastards to be headed this direction out toward The Barrens. Mist hangs heavy, fresh off the same smothering rain from last night, and he finds himself thinking that you just don't get this shit in Los Angeles. Birds sing; water drips from the trees still. Things are oddly peaceful for how deeply shitty he feels.

It only takes a couple minutes to fire off the email to his manager about staying here a few more days, feeding Steve – a fortunately patient person – some line about the death of a close friend that's both total bullshit and so painfully, painfully true to write that for a second Richie stops breathing, just before he presses _send_ on his phone. The screen's cracked. He only notices that now.

The thing is that he can just hear Eddie's voice, telling him to just _bite the bullet and get a new fucking phone, dickwad, you're gonna slice your hands all to pieces on that broken fucking glass_. 

He does not get a new phone.

It occurs to him, though, that should this whole terrible mess be forgotten just like his childhood, he doesn't _actually_ want to forget it. Forgetting it, he thinks, would probably be just as lonely as remembering it, except with the added general shittiness of not having the rest of the Losers there to remind him how much they love him.

Richie doesn't know why he does it, but he goes back to the fucking arcade for another token. And then he spends a confusing, though probably not alarming, amount of time poring over his broken phone screen looking on tips for making those little macrame nets that he sees on all the crystal-bearing kids in Starbucks back out in LA. They're good for one thing at least, it seems, and by the time he's done, the arcade token rests right over his heart, metal cool and kitchen twine salvaged from the inn soft against his sternum. He stops thinking about it after that – makes himself stop.

(Somewhere, Georgie Denbrough snatches up his boat just before it vanishes into the darkness below the street. He shakes the water off of it, takes it back home. Maybe Bill will play with him tomorrow, when he feels better.)

(The voice in the sewer catches the next child. The cycle is unbroken, the seven friends must only deal with Derry for so long. They never look back. They never remember, either, but they don't stay and they don't look back.)

They're on a video chat weeks later, the six of them, still dealing with the emotional wreckage from Stan's funeral and the warmth of Patricia Blum Uris welcoming them with open arms through the worst of circumstances, as much one of their own as Stan had always been – and then there's the dim, distant memorial that Eddie's wife had held for him. With no body, it had apparently taken her some time to come to terms with the fact that Eddie had died far below Derry. Bev had reached out; she hadn't gotten much back from a woman rightfully confused by the sudden appearance of five heretofore vanished childhood friends and the wife of a dead sixth.

No one really holds it against Myra – there was no tie to them before, and little enough remains after.

Richie, though, is plagued.

“Guys,” he tells their slightly grainy pictures, all crammed onto his laptop screen. He can hear himself echoing in someone's space. “I've gotta tell you something.”

It must be something about his tone; they settle immediately, brows quirked and lips turned into downhill slopes. 

He's silent for a long time, and eventually it's Mike who prompts him. “It's alright, Rich,” he says. He's somewhere that's still warm, even as fall trips close on heavier and heavier feet. The sun lights his face, and Richie takes some comfort in the fact that Mike, Mike, is getting to have what they all should have – a full life and fully remembered. “There's nothing you can't tell us.”

(The way he says it makes Richie think perhaps his breakdown in the silty quarry waters is still fresh in all their minds.)

Richie heaves an exhale. “Fuck, you’re gonna think I’m losing it,” he tells them by way of preparing. “I don't think I'm remembering Derry right.” He realizes what he's said. “Again,” he clarifies. “But different,” he tacks on when the others go wide around the eyes and tight around the corners of their mouths.

“Different how?” Ben asks with a tilt to one eyebrow, the historian and scholar in him enough to match Mike stride for stride.

“It's like … a track switcher,” Richie says. “You know, for trains?”

“Trains?”

“Yeah,” he says, “big fuckin' engines, run on rails?”

Ben levels him with a look, but hasn't been pushed quite far enough to say it.

“You're too good to me, Haystack. Anyway.” He clears his throat, and the lid of his laptop does a little shimmy. “It's like this: there's a single track from the time we were kids until we came back to Derry. And then it splits.” He holds up two fingers, first together, then in a V. “There's a version where it happened like it happened,” he holds up his index finger, “and a version where – where it didn't.” 

He searches for another joke to make, fails to light on one, pointedly flips them off to keep from strangling on the words. Probably wouldn't hit the same now, anyway, not after they'd seen him lose it there in the muddy waters. 

“Beep beep, Richie.” 

God bless Bev Marsh.

“So w-what happened in the other version,” Bill cuts in, stressed, “that makes it s-so separate?”

Well, Richie doesn't say. Where to start, he doesn't say.

“It's not so simple,” he does settle on. “There are actually a couple of splits. I feel like I'm losing my motherfuckin' mind, guys. No bullshit, there's a version where Stan comes with us. Saves our asses. And then there's—” 

Bev doesn't have to say 'Eddie.' The pity on her face says it for him.

Richie clears his throat instead. “Another one, the rest of us come out from under Neibolt. Six of us. Fucked up,” he adds as an afterthought, because how could they not, “but six of us. And then there’s the one where only five of us come back to begin with. I think something stopped you from calling,” he tells Mike, “but I don’t know what.”

Mike looks stricken at that, and Richie wishes he could hug him. “Whatever it was, it wasn’t your fault,” he tells his friend with absolute certainty. “I know that much.”

They all sit in silence is what they all do, processing Richie's newest information and each of them, every one, wondering the same question that only Bev Marsh has the guts to ask.

“Alright,” she says, tone brooking no argument. “What are we gonna do about it?”

The week before Eddie's chest explodes from the phantom wound, things get strange. Even before the dreams, before the not-phone-call, his life gets confusing by degrees. He's walking down the street on his lunch hour, making a break for the bodega a few blocks away – for the cat, and the owners, mostly, not to mention the distance from his office – when chilly knowledge is dropped straight into his brain that the kid riding his bicycle, training wheels and all, is about to tip off the sidewalk and into the street, which is fine because there's no traffic but less fine in that he's gonna fall, he's gonna start crying, and Eddie can _see_ it in washed-out color and he doesn't want to deal with it, and then he _cares_ , and then –

He steps into the street first, and the kid veers sharply back onto the pavement to avoid him, and Eddie continues about his day without a splitting tension headache.

It doesn't stop after that, though, so eventually he gets the headache anyway. Fuckin' bullshit.

Winter comes to California the same way it always does, which is to say that it doesn’t for Richie. Especially now that he remembers some truly spectacular Maine winters, boughs of the endless pine trees in The Barrens laden with sparkling jackets of ice, the mild Los Angeles temperatures don’t really stand up. They’re better on his joints, though.

In all the interim months, though, the Losers still haven’t managed to work up a solution to Richie’s split timeline problem, and the result is that he pretty much wallows in it – not intentionally, but because it’s hard to not feel like he’s lost it. Among…other things, it seems that remembering the wrong past has odd little consequences for the future; half the time, Richie feels as if everything he knows is wrong, and the rest of the time.

Well.

He knows too much. For a hot minute, he contemplates taking up with the infamous California psychics, figuring that if nothing else, he can make a bit out of it when he gets his next show written (his own words, this time, and they’re not _entirely_ honest, but he stops making the jokes that get him skin-crawling guffaws from the husbands of women who look distant and miserable). That doesn’t work, though – he tests his apparent knowledge of the future on Bill, who sometimes camps in Richie’s nook of a living room while Audra’s on set somewhere. As it turns out, Richie’s split-second knowledge of the future is less something that can be channeled and more something that’s dropped, ice cube down his spine in the sultry desert evenings, onto him in the moment. He’s held a lot of doors for people at the last second, over the last month, but that’s about the most useful of it.

“Rich,” Bill tells him seriously after Richie’s “reflexes” keep them from getting into (causing, Richie knows) a nasty pileup on the 405 the time Bill’s flying out of LAX at midday (a bold decision, Richie thinks, and not one he would have made) to get in a book signing in fucking Kansas City. “W-we oughta call Mike again, or something. Even if he doesn’t know anything new, he’s got friends all over the w-world, now. Plus library T-ywitter. Someone has to know s-s- _something_.”

Richie’s about to protest, to throw a hand lazily across the steering wheel in a grip he knows would have driven Eddie up a fucking wall, to brush off the fact that they were both whole and hale when they should have been crumpled into car number three of about 30, but Bill cuts across him. Big Bill, who had once punched him in the face and then made him kill a fucking clown. Twice.

“R-Richie.” Bill claps a hand to his shoulder, moves it to the back of his neck, thumb pressing gently into the hollow behind Richie’s right ear. “I’m getting w-worried, man. You told our friends you had it under control, and I-I guess I wanted to believe that for a minute, but.” There are creases in Bill’s face, ones Richie guesses he never paid attention to before. It’s easy to see now how he’d picked up the grey in his hair. Big Bill, trying to solve this one thing with the tenacity of a snapping turtle. “It’s g-getting worse, isn’t it?”

He doesn’t have an answer for that one. Traffic starts moving again, and when Bill is dropped off and boarded and in the air, Richie curls up on his bed and dreams, uneasy.

Eddie Kaspbrak wakes up in a parking lot in Derry. The mist hangs low, and the sign reading 

**RESERVED**

**PARKING**

**FOR THE**

**WORLDS**

has been shot to hell. Somehow, it seems more accurate without the rest of the words that were surely once there. 

The parking lot is abandoned; a few rusted-out frames of farm trucks beaten to hell and once-slick sports cars left to die. The mechanic in him itches to get his hands into their crumbling innards and see if he couldn’t bring them back, but he doesn’t have the know-how, not really, not after so long spent as a goddamn risk analyst. 

Eddie himself sits in the back seat of an old Valiant, squat and sitting low to the ground. The door takes some shoving, his shoulder doling out the brunt of the force needed to make the heavy steel door open. He tumbles out when it gives under him; the ground is soft, cool, just the kind of cushion he’d want after falling out of a decades-old car and bashing his head on the ground. Mentally assessing the state of his body – battered shoulder aside – he determines that he’s probably fine, and just. Lays there, enjoying the stars wheeling overhead against the dazzling canvas of the sky.

He doesn’t know this time if it’s a dream or not, but with the view above him, he can’t make himself care. It’s a nice break from the tension his life has been filled with – with Myra worried about him and work feeling so deeply like what he isn’t supposed to be doing, he can almost, _almost_ , remember being a kid and doing this same thing, lying out under the stars in a Maine hayfield with his friends—

His friends. His _friends_ , and he can’t remember them to save his life, their faces obscured in the glow of the stars, but he’s so, so certain that they were his whole life. The only thing in Maine worth loving, the only thing from Derry, _Derry_ , that he wishes he could grasp and the only thing he just _can’t_ get his mind around. The memories don’t come, and Eddie has no doubt it’s because he can’t picture his friends’ faces, write down their names.

At that, he sits up, hurt and angry and scared but determined in a way he’s also suddenly certain he hadn’t been since childhood. It’s what he’s missing, the whole goddamn first part of his life. The sky keeps turning, slowly, stars trailing off into the marbled blackness of space.

Eddie Kaspbrak stands up in a parking lot in Derry, eyes fixed on that endless painting overhead. From his full height, the branches of the pine trees ringing the parking lot make a picture frame. Funny, he thinks, you’d have expected them to be more present from flat on his back, mossy gravel dampening his shirt.

_Eddie?_

It’s the same voice, the one that echoes from beneath the manhole covers in the city. He still can’t place it, but here, Eddie feels it reverberating, unearthly, bouncing off of each rusted-out shell of a car and rattling the sudden ice in the pines and shaking through the loose gravel at his feet, and—

EDDIE.

Eddie jumps.

HELLO, EDDIE KASPBRAK.

The fuck, Eddie thinks faintly.

YOU’VE COME A LONG WAY, the new, resounding voice says to him from everywhere and nowhere, not rattling the stars like the other echo but emanating from and from between them. BUT I AM SORRY TO TELL YOU – RIGHT WAY STATION, WRONG TIME.

“What the fuck does that mean?” He sounds braver than he feels, and remembers – thinks – feels someone’s hand on his face, telling him he’s braver than he thinks. He tastes steel and coppery blood between his teeth. “Who the fuck are you?”

IN DUE TIME, the voice says, BUT FOR NOW, PERHAPS YOU SHOULD DRIVE ONE. It’s a gentle enough suggestion, and Eddie relaxes unbidden. LIKE YOU MAY HAVE DONE ONCE BEFORE.

Because that makes sense. But the whisper of the trees and the timbre of the voice and something, something in the air even in _fucking_ Dream Derry makes him poke around among the cars, looking for one, just one, that has both an engine and a functioning door.

The search is not easy. Eventually, though, he slides into the driver’s seat of a T-bird that makes him just a little sad. The engine turns over, and he wakes up to the wee hours of a New York Tuesday morning, as peaceful as one such morning can ever be, Myra sleeping next to him.

When the sun has risen, he tells her he’s leaving. Something about waking up knowing that he absolutely is dead in another version of this year does a number on him, leaves marks in his soul that he’s not sure he can buff out. When he’s called in sick to work, he lights out for a diner of the particular shabbiness he didn’t realize he’d forgotten from childhood. All he can bring himself to order is a bowl of cereal, no matter how tempting the plate of eggs, bacon, and hash browns all smothered in ketchup looks on the table across the aisle, and he lifts the milk-dripping spoon to his mouth mechanically, staring disconsolately at a patch of floor where the industrial carpet has worn thin.

Eddie thinks about his death, the one he’s sure has already happened a couple of worlds over. He tasted metal in his mouth earlier, felt a knife blade come between his jaws from the outside. That isn’t the worst of it, he knows, but it had been a trial this morning to shake the feeling of a hole punched from spine to sternum. The thick taste of blood in his mouth, the feel of it, the sound of his lungs collapsing, it’s all gone now, in the daylight, drowned out by generic diner cereal and slightly burned coffee. But he knows what he felt, and he doesn’t think he’ll forget it in a hurry.

Sometimes, Bev finds herself thinking about Stan, late at night on the boat with Ben but sitting alone on the deck, under all those sparkling stars. She thinks about living with the knowledge of his death, all those years where she couldn’t reach out and stop it before it happened.

Sometimes, when the time zones are right, Bev calls Richie on those nights, to talk about how much they missed him. She thinks about the nights they spent piled into the back of Richie’s dad’s car, while the others went about their evenings with their families, some more contentedly than others, while Bev made an escape and Richie and Stan took advantage of their parents’ good graces (and intentions) to keep her company on weeknights.

When Richie told them all, months ago now, that he was seeing the wrong pasts and the bits of the future that hung suspended between them, Bev’s first thought was all the years she spent under the shadows of their deaths. She didn’t know how they connected beyond the Deadlights, and only guessed at that much, but, she told herself, it would be an insult to Stan and to Eddie and to strong, sweet, warm Patricia Uris if they didn’t try to figure it out.

“Richie,” she asks him over the speaker once, phone resting beside her on the deck as the boat bobbed in the harbor they’d put up in for the night, “do you think we can get them back?”

He lets out a sigh from deep in his bones, colored with all the months she knew he’d spent digging through any information Mike and Ben could come up with – half those conversations she’d heard Ben’s half of, and in some of them she’d even offered what she could when the topic strayed into deadlit territory. Now that she could remember high school, Bev was certain she’d never seen Richie throw himself so completely into research on anything. “I hope so, Bev,” he eventually settles on, the words slipping out of him in an air-starved whisper. “Don’t really know what I’m going to do if we can’t.” Richie’s tired, more tired than Bev has ever heard him, and further from jokes than he’s ever been.

Bev calls Patty the next morning, just to catch up, dreams of Stan laughing and at peace and with them all still ringing through her mind.

Richie dreams, too, but of a familiar parking lot – it occurs hazily to him that he could maybe place all the bullet holes in the sign, one by one, even blindfolded. He’s not, though, blindfolded that is, and when he looks up his breath leaves him in a rush, the sky marbled like the endpapers of all those old, old books Mike and Ben have been turning up. The light is all blue-green, like looking up from underwater at the quarry – but someone has turned up the saturation. The stars glitter like dust motes, and the pines whisper like old friends, which, he supposes, they are. They wave in a lofty wind, and Richie thinks probably everything is going to be fine, at least until he wakes up.

It’s a relief – since the summer, a shitshow in and of itself, pretty much everything else had been a shitshow, too. He’d spent a lot of nights calling Bev and Ben and Mike and Bill and having tiny little breakdowns over the phone, getting to the point of shouting – not at them, just to them – about how he felt like his head had flown off and started spinning around his feet.

Right now, he only feels fallen pine needles spinning around his feet, stirred up gently by a breeze. It feels like it’s tugging at him, taking him by the hand (or ankle, anyway, like a puppy) and saying “come this way! I have something to show you!”

He takes one more look at the jeweled, brilliant sky, and doesn’t see any reason to not go along.

There are so many more cars parked below the RESERVED PARKING sign, each of them lined up and rusted out, left there to watch time wear on. Richie wanders among them, running his hand down the fenders of an old Valiant here, a decrepit Thunderbird there, a heartbreaking Mustang with every mirror and pane of glass shattered. One of them, he thinks, might even be a Model T. He’s never been too familiar with cars, but he can appreciate them nonetheless.

Richie doesn’t get in one, though, just wanders around the graveyard of steel and admires.

Or. Well. He does for a few minutes, caught between that and staring at the sky and reveling in the pace of it all and then—

HELLO, RICHIE TOZIER.

“Jesus Christ!” He jumps, his feet actually leave the ground because a _voice_ is in his _ear_ and it sounds like it’s rumbling up from the very earth and down from the sky at him. “What the fuck,” he asks the parking lot at large when he recovers, panting as his heart slows.

No one answers him. 

“Hello?” He’s a little wary, now, because it’s not every dream where he shows up in a decidedly more cosmic version of his favorite parking lot (itself not a thing he expected to have) and hears voices less than a year after killing a killer clown and witnessing the apparent whole of the fucking event chain laid out in his head.

It’s a lot, is what it is. He’s earned the right to be wary, he believes, and he better than most knows what belief will do for a body.

“Hey,” he calls out, nerves keying up. “Someone fucking there? I don’t know whether to get angry or go hide in that tiny, deeply uncomfortable looking Fiat right now. I guess now I’ve given away my hiding spot, though, I guess I gotta get angry unless you answer me right fucking – ”

DON’T BE ALARMED, RICHIE, the voice says. WE ARE KNOWN TO ONE ANOTHER.

Much like other, more distressing knowledge that has been imparted to Richie over the last few months, the answer presents itself to him with little fanfare. “Maturin,” he says. It’s not a question. “I thought you choked on a universe or something.”

MY SYMPATHY FOR THE REMNANTS BEING FORCED ON YOU.

“No shit,” Richie tells the turtle. “That’s what all this is? And here I was just thinking I’d hit my head coming off the cliff at the quarry.” He takes a perch in the bed of an old truck sitting on blocks. “That’s a relief, anyway.”

They sit in silence for a moment, Richie Tozier and the bodiless voice of a cosmic fucking turtle. Mysteries solved, the lot is once again the most peaceful place Richie has been in months. Bev’ll be overjoyed.

The cosmos – and now Richie is thinking about it all spilling from the mouth of a giant turtle, but that’s not quite as grand as he’d hoped it would be – keeps wheeling above him, ice on the pines in the wind playing him a shivery little melody.

YOU CAN DRAW HIM BACK, RICHIE.

He starts so hard that he falls off the bed of the truck, and wakes up.

Patricia Blum Uris does not answer the phone for everyone at 7:30 in the morning, especially on weekends, even though she is routinely awake, out of bed, and showered by this point in the day. She does, however, answer when it’s a Loser, and particularly when that Loser is Richie Tozier, who stood up and clapped after Stan swore at his bar mitzvah in front of the whole synagogue. He’d sworn his undying loyalty to Patty multiple times over the last few months, and is quite possibly her biggest fan; she’s never had a fan before, because the word is too weak to ever describe her husband, but having one now - five, really - sort of makes her understand why celebrities do the dumb shit they do to keep theirs.

“Richie Tozier!”

“Patty Blum Uris!”

She cradles the phone on her shoulder. “How in the world are you on this fine Saturday morning at - ” she checks the mental clock - “4:37 a.m., Richie, are you alright?”

Richie chuckles at her, tinny. “Yeah, Pats, I’m alright. I had...I guess it was a weird dream, and I thought you should be the first person to hear about it.”

“Tell me about it, killer.”

Richie does not, and rather than press, Patty busies herself putting the appropriate amount of creamer in her coffee. When he does speak, he’s oddly serious, even taking into consideration the impossible amounts of trauma and confusion he’s dealt with since Derry. She knew everything, of course, the Losers Club having been eager to induct her, less keen on sharing the gorier details, and gently (but in no uncertain terms) convinced that yes, she could and wanted to handle it. Patty does not expect to have to remind Richie of this now, but she half-prepares for it nonetheless.

“You gotta promise you won’t fly out here and kick my ass, Pattycakes, I don’t know if my delicate constitution could handle it right now,” he teases, but Patty can hear the genuine tension in it. She does not lean into it, knowing well enough by now that Richie does better with a little space these days.

“Alright, I promise not to fly out there and kick your ass. If it’s that bad, I’ll just teleport instead.”

That gets another chuckle out of him. “Patty gets off a good one,” he says in a mild voice. “No, but. So you know the turtle.”

“I know of him,” she agrees.

That appears to be all he needs, because he launches into vivid description, talking about the sky all marbled with blues and greens and millions of stars, of his life gone weird for months, of the pine trees waving in the wind and the sense that getting in one of the rusted-out old shells of cars would be the perfect way to _escape_ , to go away and leave it all behind like who among us hasn’t dreamed of? And then a voice from between the stars and from the very air, saying -

“He said I could bring him back, Patty. Both of them. Stan and Eddie both. Maybe even Georgie, I don’t know what kind of time limit is on these things.” There’s a rustling, and Patty has a distinct impression of him, sitting upright in his bed, hair wild and getting worse as he drags his hands through it. She didn’t know him when he was thirteen, but she’s having very little trouble imagining it. He sounds young, and scared, and Patty knows exactly what’s coming next.”

“...Patty? Pats?”

It occurs to her that she’s been too long without saying anything, so she raises her voice for the speakerphone she’d put on middle of his speech, dragging the laptop into the kitchen from the living room. “Can you get me from the airport this week, Richie?”

Even his silence sounds startled for a moment. “From LAX? Sure, but you swore you wouldn’t fly out here to kick my ass, Patty.”

“I’m aware, and I meant it,” she tells him. “Looks like the flight puts me there at around six on Tuesday, is that going to be alright?”

He probably gawps at her; she can practically see his eyes get huge behind the glasses, famous trashmouth slack. “I mean. Yeah, we might hit some of the after-work traffic, but of cou-”

“Six in the morning, Richie.”

“Ah, fuck.” There’s more rustling. “I’ll be there, of course. You’re a force of nature, Patricia Uris.”

Patty smiles; she knows.

(At long, long last, the dust settles. The last boards of the decrepit house tumble into the abyss, and then:

“Shit,” Stan breathes. “Shit, I gotta call Patty.” He spills everything; she listens; she believes him.

And Patty is so glad to hear from the love of her life and so devastated to hear about Eddie that she gets into Augusta bonkers early the next morning because it was the last flight she could book the same day.

And Patty is

And Patty is so glad to hear from the love of her life and so relieved to hear that they got Eddie to the hospital - even before she’s met him, before she’s spoken to any of the others - that she gets into Augusta bonkers early the next morning because it was the last flight she could book the same day.

Richie is the second person she hugs, uncurling him from the chair he’s slouched into in the lobby of the Derry Townhouse

into in the

into in the hospital room where he’s determined to camp out.

She doesn’t say much, just loops him into her arms and tries to convey that she has his back, too, just like his other friends.)


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HELLO i am so sorry, i know it's been months (if you were listening back then, thanks for sticking around) AND that the chapter count went up. i'm already writing chapter 3, unlike when i posted chapter one in april and proceeded to not write anything else for...too long. if it goes up again to four you have full permission to hit me with a rolled-up newspaper. i don't know that it will stop me, but it sure can't hurt.
> 
> this chapter touches on Stan's death a little more specifically than the first chapter did, as well as a few other brief warnings including: other deaths, one incredibly brief joke about mainlining, Richie having basically the same vomit response as he did when Mike called, and Richie briefly having very little hope of surviving this whole deal. for a better description, please check the end notes. to completely skip Stan thinking about his suicide attempt, skip from "Except then Mike Hanlon calls" to "Possibly it's the painkillers." (other other warnings include: "this will teach the author to write something based solely on the vibes instead of having a plot," the author never having been to either Maine or Los Angeles, and probably too many Dark Tower easter eggs that really don't mean much of anything.)

Mike Hanlon and Ben Hanscom each privately think the other deserves a fucking medal for “World’s Best Obscure-Shit Researcher.” Particularly lately, with whatever is going on with one of their dearest and most erratic of friends. They have entire conversations on Richie’s predicament that Richie is decidedly but not maliciously looped out of, and secondary conversations about how that would make them feel guilty if it weren’t for the incredible amount of information that is either deeply nothing or completely overwhelming, with very little in between. 

Which is why, when Richie finally texts them mere hours ahead of time to tell them about the dream and his upcoming impromptu reunion with one Patricia Blum Uris, national treasure, they immediately call each other. 

“We can’t tell him yet,” Mike says urgently toward the mouthpiece of his phone, all but sprinting to his truck while pulling up directions for the 1,300 miles between Rapid City and Los Angeles. “Pin it on my hesitance to get into rituals we don’t fully understand, _again_ , but we can’t tell him yet.”

Ben’s voice, distorted by the shitty speaker on Mike’s phone, is reluctant. “I mean, I agree with you wholeheartedly, Mike, but we don’t even know if that’s going to be required. That was _one_ account that we got, like, sixth-hand. From a guy literally wearing a tinfoil hat. Who swears there was a demon spider hybrid baby involved.”

“I know, but you can understand my aversion to it, right?” The engine of his truck turns over without a hitch and he heads for the highway. Logically, Mike knows that Ben, of all people, gets where he’s coming from, but it’s become very important to Mike that these things be expressed often and vehemently when they arise. “I’m not keen on inviting more demons into our lives and then having to, uh. Distract it. In order to bring someone through. And if he’s involving Patty, then Richie probably thinks he can get to Stan, too. So I _really_ don’t wanna have to distract a demon twice. Again.”

Ben coughs a little over the phone in a way that Mike recognizes as the auditory equivalent of shuffling your feet. “Yeah, I get it. So what _do_ we do, then?”

“For now? I think we ought to keep digging. I’m driving out there now, but I’ll make some calls.” The engine, kept in shape over the years by Mike’s own hands, more often than not, only complains a little as he steps on the gas.

They sketch out the shape of what they ought and ought not tell Richie, and Ben makes his own plans to loop in Bev and get them both to Los Angeles. When they hang up, Mike’s first call is to Bill, the closest of them to Richie’s doorstep and the one who has the most reason (or, rather, the least suspicious reason and a standing invitation) to show up on it. It’s not time to actually tell the others what they know, Mike and Ben had swiftly agreed, but it’s high time for the second reunion meeting of the Losers Club.

Richie fetches out to LAX at a miserably early hour that is only made worth it by Patty’s exuberant embrace when he meets her at arrivals (feeling like a sap, but embracing it) and fully lifts her, single carry-on bag and one personal item and all, off the ground. They don’t talk about the detail, the texture of the dreams yet – Richie’s sort of hoping he’ll have another one while Patty’s staying in his guest room so they can pick it apart while it’s fresh. In the car, on the way back to his apartment, they look at the shape of it, and Patty Googles tons of shit about lucid dreaming; they work out a list of questions that Richie ought to ask Maturin should he get another chance to talk shop about the warp and weft of the universe. (Did Patty just accidentally talk him into learning to weave?)

In the end, what they do in the daylight hours is hit all of Richie’s favorite places in the city, and some of the touristy shit for good measure. Patty’s in for the remainder of the week, with winter break at the college where she teaches wrapping up all too soon. Richie has no doubt that Mike and Ben have told Bill and Bev about the general state of things; he fully expects Big Bill to show up with that concerned brow and matching savior complex by the afternoon. Mike he expects at precisely 10:00 that evening, provided he left immediately. No later than 10:30, either way. Ben’s harder to nail down, with flight times, and the same would go for Bev except that he fully assumes she’ll just bend heaven and earth to get to him as soon as possible.

So he spends some blissfully normal time with Patty, soaking up the West Coast version of weak winter sun and trying not to miss ice-laden pines.

_This kills monsters, if you believe it does._ A group consensus puts them back at the belief square; Bev hones in on Richie’s apparently baseless but decidedly rock-solid gut feeling that it came down to the cars in the parking lot. She and Patty have flanked him literally and metaphorically, backing up his more reasonable impulses and choosing chairs at each of his elbows as the Losers Club (including new member Patty Blum Uris) sprawl out on his mismatched patio furniture on his grubby little patio that his absent landlord hadn’t even built right (who puts down the center of the rubber flooring before the edges? It may not rain much, but what does fall always ends up standing in a puddle at the center and making him wary about the structural integrity of his second-floor porch retrofit).

He hasn’t had another dream since all the Losers have been piled up at his and Bill’s places. Patty’s got only a few more days before she has to get back to Georgia and teach her freshmen, who all adore her; not having the dreams has been great for Richie’s ability to hold a conversation without either crying or losing the thread of it, but it’s been bad for strategy. With no more chances to talk to Maturin, or to even get back to the lot and start opening doors, even Mike and Ben are starting to run out of impactful things to add to the conversation.

They’d switched to splitting bottles of wine and 12-packs of beer as of last night, and tonight isn’t any different. Friday, and with only the one full day left ahead of them. Only getting as far as “I think Richie should get in a car if he believes he should get in a car” isn’t as reassuring with no car to get into.

“So, what, Rich,” Bill says. “What if you d-don’t have the dream again?”

Richie feels lucky that the question gets him a chorus of “whoas” and “heys!” and “Bills…” before he can even answer. Patty bristles to his right, lit up like a beacon in a sunset that’s honestly not even particularly spectacular, just a regular warm gold spilling over Patty’s cheekbones and her hair. She doesn’t elaborate on her outraged “ _watch it_ ,” just sips at her wine and shoots Bill a daggered look that Richie thinks is probably not _entirely_ serious, but is certainly more than teasing.

Richie shakes his head and waves them down. “It’s fine, guys. I don’t know, I’ve thought about it.” He rolls the cool, dark glass of his beer bottle between his palms. “I mean I definitely don’t like it. Probably I’ll just have to keep all my emotions rights here,” he puts a finger to his sternum, “and then one day I’ll die.”

“Beep beep, Rich,” Ben says, “stop copping Mulaney’s shit.”

Richie shrugs.

Bev reaches out and takes his hand, clearly reading what he’s trying not to have to say and preemptively providing emotional fucking superglue, industrial strength for the pieces of him left by the very thought of not having the dream again, much less admitting out loud that it would _definitely fucking kill him_ if he didn’t. Bev would need a forge; there’d be no saving him, just melting him down and trying to cast him into something new. A headstone, maybe. A monument. But not for Richie.

He jerks at that, startles hard and blinks rapidly upon realizing how fucking dark that is and that he hasn’t not really, answered Bill. As much as the others clearly don’t want to upset him, the one having the dreams and their only link to the place with the pines, they’re clearly curious and he’s spent too much time in his head now, it’s getting awkward, fuck.

He shrugs again. “I guess if I don’t have the dream again…we’ll have to figure something else out.” Richie’s a little surprised to hear himself say it, at the steel in his own voice making it sound like a stranger’s – he’s not sure of that, he’s not sure there’s any way to be sure of that. But he said it, and he finds himself meaning it. “If there’s a chance we can get them back, both of them.” Patty looks close to tears herself, and he puts down the empty bottle to take her hand with the one Bev isn’t still holding. “If there’s one chance then that means it has to be possible, right? I’m not stopping until it happens.”

Richie doesn’t know who this is. It’s not him, not usually. But just maybe, he thinks, it could be. Should be. Must be, if they want this to work.

Eddie wants this to work. He hasn’t really lived on his own since college, and even _that_ wasn’t like _this_ , not with Sonia hovering as much as she could from what felt like a million million miles away and right in his ear at the same time. It’s better like this, with months separating him from Myra and their divorce, which, all things considered, hadn’t been as drawn-out (or as _messy_ ) as he’d anticipated. The hard part was getting her to realize he was serious, and after the wailing for him to stay that entailed, her stony silence had been more or less amenable to just getting it over with peacefully.

But without her meticulous coordination of their joint social life, most of which had only marginally involved him and had therefore been easy to extricate himself from, he had a lot of free time. Part of making life work now is finding hobbies, which is how he finds himself at a garage a little ways from his new house, a fair drive by urban standards but nothing that someone mightn’t undertake on a Saturday afternoon if they now live in a smaller town. Which he does. As of this morning.

He lives in a little town upstate now, working remotely for the same firm and feeling more lost than ever at it, especially compared to actually getting his hands _greasy_ in the guts of old cars. He tries not to dwell on what drew him to it; the dreams haven’t really stopped, but they’ve been far and away less intense than the first one.

Eddie hasn’t gotten into another one of the cars like he had the first time. It hasn’t felt like the right time yet, not the way the voice had implied, but whoever the fuck it was also hadn’t been back to tell him what he was waiting for. Each time he woke up in the parking lot, the only voice had been the whispering from the icy trees. Sometimes it still sounds like they’re calling him, but he tries not to dwell on that, either.

It’s freezing, but that doesn’t stop him like it might have a year ago; he layers up, goes for a run, and doesn’t bother with a shower when he gets back home, instead changing into something that’s already grimy and bundling himself into the car to head to the garage. It’s not lost on him that this, too has changed – a year ago, six months ago, this very summer past, he would have rather scrubbed himself raw in two blistering showers in one day than roll already salt-tacky into an auto shop that he would undoubtedly leave almost unrecognizably filthy.

(Don’t get him wrong, though – upon his return home he would still immediately head for the shower to scrub off both of his hobbies under scalding water.)

The owner of the garage, a scowly fellow by the name of Shane Roland, is rarely as displeased as he looks when Eddie shows up. If he didn’t know better, Eddie would almost call it a soft spot that the old man maybe had, but the affection seemed to extend to one other person and precisely one dog, as well, so Eddie didn’t press. After all, Shane never bitched at him for not knowing shit, just explained it even if he did get a little impatient sometimes.

“Kaspbrak,” he barks when Eddie closes the door behind him. “The hell you doing here in weather this shitty, we talked about this.”

“Sorry, Shane,” Eddie says, unrepentant, “ran out of other shit to do today. Thought you could use a hand, maybe.”

Shane shakes his head. “Sorry, kid, not today. I was actually about to close up shop and get home before the storm gets ahead of me,” he says, not unkindly, but he’s clearly made up his mind and there’s no arguing with him after that. He shuffles around to the door Eddie just came in and casts a shrewd, native New Englander eye at the horizon. “Gonna be a bad one. Get on home, Eddie.”

Eddie frowns with one side of his mouth, but makes sure Shane is in his own running car before heeding his order.

Looks like a night in. Maybe a horror movie marathon, or The Twilight Zone, and popcorn (stovetop, something he can do himself), followed by a _normal amount of flossing his teeth_ , thank you, and an early night.

He gets as far as a docuseries (and popcorn) before falling asleep on the couch, heedless of the fact that he should have at least stretched out flat instead of propping his head up on the armrest.

The forest lot is waiting for him as always, the same icy needles jangling softly as he walks amongst the old cars, occasionally touching a fender here, a hood there, reaching into a broken-out window to grip a steering wheel.

Richie’s lucky that night. His head hits the pillow after a Losers chat into the small hours, and immediately he’s feeling chilly Maine air and listening to the whisper of the pines under the impossible sky.

(Somewhere, in his sleep, Stan Uris rolls over, arm tucked around Patty Blum Uris in their Georgia home. The air’s humid and bright and not at all piney, and he breathes deep, six new numbers saved into his phone.)

For the first time since the first time, Eddie notices that someone else is in the lot with him. It’s not the voice this time, it’s a _person_ who he can _see_ and – 

And who looks a little familiar, even though Eddie doesn’t think he’s ever seen this person before in his life. Eddie would practically swear to it. Eddie would know, if he knew. And yet, there’s a face in his mind, though the newcomer isn’t even facing him, just standing there with dark hair and broad shoulders hunched in on himself and his leather jacket too thin for the sharp fangs winter is baring.

“Hello?”

Those shoulders go tense.

“Hey, how’d you get here? Who are you?” Eddie starts weaving through the cars toward him; his footsteps must be growing audible, because right before he gets to him, as he reaches out a hand to meet that smooth leather, the newcomer turns. His face _is_ familiar, and Eddie would still swear that he doesn’t know it –

– except he does.

He hits his knees at Eddie’s feet, the familiar newcomer, the best friend he hasn’t seen in almost 30 years, a child’s face grown up blindly into a man’s but still as well-known to Eddie as if he’d seen it every day.

Eyes go wide behind thick glasses in dark, heavy frames, and those broad shoulders shake; Eddie’s not sure if it’s the cold or the torrent of emotions playing over that familiar face.

“Eddie?”

…Who the fuck is this guy?

Richie turns around and feels like his chest is going to collapse. He knew it, he _knew it_ , he fuckin’ _knew_ there was a chance. Now all he has to do is find out what the Turtle actually meant by “draw him back,” and then it’s just a matter of seeking out Stan, too, and then just fucking…doing that, whatever the goddamn Turtle wanted, as long as he gets his – his friends back.

God, Eddie’s face. Richie hits his knees, dream-gravel biting through his jeans.

“Eddie?”

There’s recognition on Eddie’s face, Richie knows that look, everything is about to be okay.

Except –

“I-I don’t remember you,” Eddie says in a shaky voice, and Richie feels his heart sink through his stomach to join his knees on the fine grit of the gravel in the lot. “I recognize you,” Eddie clarifies, because something must play over Richie’s face to make his voice get all high and fast like that, “but I don’t. I can’t remember.”

Richie reminds himself to draw in breaths, and that there’s no telling what the rules are here. “It’s okay, Eds, just. Just give it a minute.” He’s trying to be optimistic, to have a little hope, to _believe_ that if he gives Eddie a minute, he’ll remember Derry the first time and Derry the second time and all the interminable years in between where all seven of them had forgotten, and suffered for it, but his grasp on belief just gets more and more tenuous as torturous seconds tick past. He doesn’t really even know if time passes the same here, because it feels like another 27 fucking years.

It’s a conscious and Herculean effort that gets Richie to his feet, and not a single whit less.

It’s mostly because his knees hurt, and definitely, _definitely_ not Eddie’s face is still as lost and confused as it was when Richie first turned around.

(It’s what he tells himself as he struggles to his feet, waving away Eddie’s polite, hesitant, reactive offer of a hand even though his knees really are barking from the impact they’d taken.)

“I’m sorry,” Eddie says as Richie unbends his knees and dusts off his jeans and tries not to feel like an old man. His voice is customer-service, all “Edward Kaspbrak speaking” like they’d given him shit for at the Jade of the Orient when Mike had gently ribbed him about it before everything fell apart; Richie gets the impression that he’s aware of how vulnerable his voice, his face, his whole posture, hell, had been just moments ago, and that Eddie’s trying hard to make up for it. “I’m usually better with faces.”

Richie waves that off, too. “It’s alright, man. Clown’ll do that to ya,” he says. Eddie blinks. Richie plows on. “Do you know what all of this is?”

“Sort of,” Eddie admits, only a fraction more relaxed. “I’ve woken up here a lot.” His head tips back to look at the swirling jewel-bright sky. “No one else has ever been here before, not really. Just a voice.”

Richie perks up a little at that, because there’s no doubt whose voice it is, even if Eddie doesn’t know. “What’s the voice say?”

“That I should get in a car. That, and something about this being the right way station but the wrong time.” Eddie looks back at him. “That’s not you, right? It’s someone else?”

Richie nods, mind reeling and trying to sort through everything Mike and Ben have given him over the weeks, but it’s like it’s all hidden behind a wall again, the same fragile, impassable kind as the different splits in his memory had been. Fuck, but if he could find the right brick to bring that one down, he thinks idly. “Yeah.”

Eddie’s face is even, hands by his sides, standing perfectly stock-still. Richie can almost imagine him in a suit, laying out whatever risks he just analyzed or what-the-fuck-ever to some other faceless suit. “Well. I guess you don’t know any more than I do, then.”

Richie’s inclined to agree with that, so he does.

“Eddie Kaspbrak,” he sticks out his hand to shake, and Richie’s mind goes blank. Not once has this man ever had to introduce himself to Richie, not like this, with a sharp, professional look on his face and an impersonal palm extended. His memories of palms and Eddie tend to run more in the vein of licking them and trying to stick them in each others’ faces as kids, of his own pressed to Eddie’s face as Richie reassured him that he was braver than he thought and again as he tried to wake him up, of his palm cradling the back of Eddie’s head as Ben’s hands reached for him and dragged him out of the house on Neibolt Street.

And this line of thought has apparently stretched on too long, because Eddie retracts his hand and Richie misses his chance.

“Alright,” Eddie says. “That. Okay. I guess I’m gonna go then, suspicion confirmed.” He moves off, picks cars at random, tugs at door handles with a mild certainty like he knows the one that opens first is the right one, whatever that means for him.

Richie snaps out of his reverie long enough to make an aborted attempt to catch his sleeve, to keep Eddie here until they figure something out. “Wait, where you going? What suspicion?”

“Hm? Oh, I’m going home.”

“You don’t just wake up?”

“No,” he explains, “I get in a car and then I wake up. It doesn’t work like that for you?”

“No.” Richie shakes his head. “I- I just wake up.”

The door to a crumbling boat of a Buick finally opens for him. “Oh. I guess that makes sense.”

“It does?”

“Yeah,” Eddie says, “considering you’re probably not real and all.”

Richie doesn’t wake up in his own bed so much as he launches himself violently out of it and makes a dash for the toilet, hanging his head into it, coughing and retching and sobbing and in equal measure.

Eddie’s still a little taken aback when he wakes peacefully on the sofa, stiff but otherwise fine. That had been the oddest of them so far – more than just someone else being in the dream, he’d never, _never_ had any experience quite like what had just happened, where he meets someone in a dream who feels so familiar but makes no explanation of themselves and vanishes from his dream – any of his dreams – in a howling rush of wind and a shower of ice from the trees that Eddie had to flinch from and can still almost feel melting in his hair.

It’s odd, because he knows he upset the newcomer, but can’t for the life of him think of any reason someone could seem so familiar but be such a stranger except that that person must be just his unconscious mind projecting and playing tricks on him.

He feels bad, though. Weird enough things have been happening to him while he’s awake, with flickers of what Eddie can only describe as ESP dogging his steps since that first day, when he’d felt like someone was supposed to call. He can’t remember who, now. Maybe that’s who the newcomer is, the person who was supposed to call but didn’t, but Eddie can’t make reason account for that either.

He does feel bad; it weighs on him. Bad-bad, down in his gut. Guilty, even, sick with it, though realistically there wasn’t anything he could have done about not knowing the newcomer.

But that face… There was something in it that he didn’t want to disappoint again.

Bill closes the door to Richie’s room quietly, heads out into the living room where the others are waiting, tense, for him to come tell them what the deal is.

God, he’s tired. Sometimes he even still finds himself thinking that this is all his fault, that if he had just not dragged them into the house when they were kids that this all could have been avoided and sure, they may have forgotten each other, but at least they’d all be alive and not tearing themselves to pieces over whatever multiverse shit was eating Richie alive.

Then he thinks about how shitty the interim 27 years had been, how empty and lonely, and some of his guilt is tempered. They’ve always been stronger together, and this is no exception. He squares his shoulders.

“Bill?” It’s Bev who speaks first, Bev who bore 27 years of seeing them all die and looks torn up that she couldn’t see this coming and stop it. “How is he?”

“He’s asleep, finally,” he confirms. “I just hope he’s too exhausted to have the dream again, at least for tonight.”

“Did he say what happened?” Mike’s eyes are wide and tender.

Bill shakes his head. “Not really. He kept saying” – except they all know that what Richie had been doing was screaming, howling like a thing killed slowly – “something about not being real.”

None of them say anything for a long, somber moment. Privately, Bill thinks they all suspect the same thing – that he finally got word from the turtle, or Eddie, or Stan, or someone, and that whatever it was, it was bad news. No one seems to want to say it, not that Bill can blame them. He doesn’t want to be the one to put it into words, either, not after hearing Richie break like that and certainly not after wrapping an arm around his trembling shoulders and helping to pull him back together again.

It’s Ben who says it, in a voice that sounds so wrecked over the whole thing that Bill also suspects he’s regretting his and Mike’s involvement. “Should… Should we stop this? _Can_ we stop this?”

Bev takes his hand, squeezes, looks at Patty. “Pats,” she says gently. “What do you think?”

Patty blinks, close to tears, and takes a breath.

When Richie wakes up, it is not from a dream, but it is with yet another bone-deep certainty, different futures and pasts all warring in his head but all leading to one godforsaken place.

The room Bill left him in – his own bedroom, he realizes belatedly – is dark, comforting, and he really, _really_ wants to not leave it. His eyelids are still heavy and the blankets are warm and the pillows are soft and he wants to abandon this stupid fucking quest once and for all; and that’s what it is, without a doubt, a task so large it threatens to consume his whole life, whether he lives to see the end or not. That’s the frustrating thing, he muses from his position as the sandwich filling between two pillows. The way all of this shit is going, it may actually kill him, from heartbreak if nothing else – the absolute hell he thought he was going through standing in that parking lot alone in his dreams is _nothing_ compared to the knife, the giant fucking clown-spider-arm-claw, through his own ribs.

 _Is this how Eddie felt?_ He doesn’t like that one, shies away from it.

Doesn’t matter, though, because Eddie doesn’t think he’s real, even though Richie would bet his shitty apartment, everything in it, the clothes on his back, everything down to his friends out in the living room, on Eddie being real. He could have touched him. Probably he should have touched him, shaken Eddie’s hand when he had the chance, just to make sure. He doesn’t like that one, either, which leaves getting up and going to face the others as his only option.

Ugh. Fuck.

He rolls away, puts his feet on the floor. Has no idea how long he’s been out, but staggers into the light of the apartment blinking and grouching and rumpled anyway.

“Richie.” Mike’s the first one to see him, and all the others perk up. Closest to him, Ben holds out a hand, which Richie takes gratefully and uses as leverage to sink onto the sofa next to him.

“How you feeling, b-buddy?” Bill frets. “Get any rest?”

It does not escape Richie that he didn’t ask about sleep. “You’re asking about the dreams,” he says, “and I’ll have you know that I did not get any rest past all the sweet, sweet dream-action I was getting from Sharon Denbrough, no.” This does not land; the whole room just rolls their collective eyes at him, but no one beeps. Admittedly, it’s not the same without Eddie to immediately blow up at him. “Okay,” he plows on, ignoring everything that just happened. “I have some news you’re really, really not going to like.”

Bev’s eyes go wide. “Worse than what you just went through, honey? Because I don’t know if any of us have it in us to watch you be in that place again.”

Richie would be swept off his feet by the rush of affection he feels for her, were he on them in the first place. “Thanks, Molly Ringwald, but I think we’re safe from that shit again at the moment.” He does push his glasses off his face, though, pressing at the sockets of his eyes underneath them. “I think we gotta go back to Derry.”

The room explodes with voices.

(They go, though, because he’s right, in the end.)

Stan doesn’t really think about it at first. He’s always felt a little more tuned-in to what his meticulous nature has helpfully filed away as “weird shit,” details that defy explanation or categorization. He thinks it has something to do with his childhood, but he can’t pin down what. Except then Mike Hanlon calls, and there’s only one move he can think to make, the one that takes him off the board, and the weird shit snaps into place. It was Derry, the whole time, because of course it was, and the bathtub is just so, so white. It hurts his head a little to look at, blinding in a house designed to be homey for a family, except now there isn’t even Patty to help fill the space, not since the crash, and all Stan Uris wants is to go home even though he’s still there and never left and probably won’t again.

(In Derry, the message, more threatening than even what’s about to come after it, written out on those little paper fortunes: GUESS STANLEY COULD NOT CUT IT, one word for each Loser present and a ringing silence for Stan. No Patricia to answer the phone. No phone for Stan to answer, not in the hospital, after he called 911 on an impulse he isn’t sure yet if he should regret or not, and no way for the others to know.)

Possibly it’s the painkillers, and the maddening monotony of being under observation, but Stan has odd dreams that he files under more “weird shit.” He wakes up in a car, an old one, first of all, in Derry, with no idea how he either knows that or got there, second of all, and under an impossibly beautiful sky, emphasis on impossible, to wrap the whole thing up.

His arm does not hurt. He doesn’t look, doesn’t check to see, but it’s nice to not feel it. Instead, Stan climbs out of the car and into the bitter cold air, shivering as blood that got used to mild Georgia winters works a little harder to try to warm him up.

HELLO STANLEY URIS. Stan knows the voice, waits for it to speak instead of trying to get answers from it. I’M GLAD YOU’RE HERE. YOU’VE COME JUST AT THE RIGHT TIME.

Derry is much as the Losers left it; the clown’s dead, but after so, so many decades of evil, it feels even to Patty that there’s something just woven into the fabric of the place that’s just _wrong_. She’d taken a leave from school, told her thesis students to email her if something gets dire, but with her feet firmly on Derry ground, she’s not sure anything could be worse than this place. She has chills just looking at the pretty, sunlit main streets and, standing here with good, new friends who had all been raised here in this place, seeing the looks on their faces, it’s _hard._ It’s so hard not to think of what they’ve lost, all of them, to this place that they’d almost entirely forgotten.

Stan didn’t even have to set foot here for it to take him away from her. Patty thinks about it bitterly, and she knows that they all lost Stan and that she can’t even imagine missing someone, keenly but without knowing it, for 27 years only to find out you’ll never see him again, but _dammit_. That’s her _husband._

_That’s her husband._

So when Richie says they can maybe get him back, she believes him, and when Richie says “we’re going to Derry,” she goes to Derry, and when Richie gets to Derry at an absurdly late hour and jokes about mainlining sleeping meds to avoid sounding nervous about being back, she makes him tea and pets his hair until he drops off on her shoulder.

“So. This is what, exactly?” Stan gives up on waiting patiently for answers after what feels like a hundred years smoothing his hand over a series of old cars, the nuances of which are fairly well lost on him.

YOU COULD CALL IT A WAY STATION, says the voice, OR PERHAPS A MID-WORLD.

“Looks like a parking lot to me.”

IT DOES LOOK LIKE A PARKING LOT, I GRANT YOU.

“Reserved parking for the worlds, right? That’s what the sign says.”

RESERVED PARKING FOR THE WORLDS, the voice agrees, THOUGH IT WOULD NOT HAVE SAID THAT IN YOURS.

“And each one of the cars is…a world?”

Stan has precisely zero evidence of a shrug happening, but that’s the sense he gets, standing in the cold night full of stars; someone shrugging massive, kind shoulders, or that they would be if those shoulders were shaped for shrugging. It seems to Stan that the voice is less of an Atlas situation and more of a universe balanced on a gentle shell slope. But, SOMETHING LIKE THAT, the voice is saying. WHAT WOULD YOU BE MOVED TO DO, STANLEY URIS, WERE THEY WORLDS?

Stan thinks about the cars, for real this time, hard, appraising. He thinks about hands covered in grease from bicycle chains and immediately scrubbed pink and almost raw with green Lava soap kept in a sheep barn, far away from everything else. He thinks about grands plans for the haze of the summer, and following them anywhere, even into the sewers, or a nightmare. He thinks about stolen beers and flicking the caps at bad jokes, about falling asleep listening to stories and poetry until he falls asleep under a short burst of red hair and wakes up to a different pair of hands hauling him off the floor in the morning and saying that grandpa made coffee and they didn’t have to go home yet.

“I think,” Stan says slowly, “that I’d pick one. Get in and drive away, I guess.” Just as slowly, he goes back to circling the cars, holding out for one that feels right, that gives him a “hi-ho Silver, away!” kind of feeling, the Maine wind in his curly hair summer and bright, rather than this toothy cold he seems stuck in now.

Something else occurs to Stan, then, a thought catching up from the voice’s assertion that the sign is different in his world. “This is Derry, right? Or something that looks like Derry.” His voice doesn’t waver; this version of Stanley Uris, like so many of the others, has seen enough horror in his life, approached so much of what is strange and horrible about the world as that world’s most sage 13-year-old – or one of them, at least, without a doubt, and the voice will attest to it – that very little would surprise him.

True to form, this is not one of those things.

IT IS. OR IT LOOKS THAT WAY. I FIND THAT A NUMBER OF YOU SEEM MOST AT PEACE HERE.

“A number?”

THREE. A FINE NUMBER. STABLE.

Stan snorts at that. “What about my friends makes you think that any of us would be particularly stable?” It doesn’t strike him as true, the part about his friends, until he says it, but then it’s out there, lingering in the air with the smell of pitch pine and rust and snow.

YOU’D BE SURPRISED, the voice says patiently. YOU WERE ALWAYS STRONGER TOGETHER, STANLEY URIS.

“Yes.” That’s incontrovertible, immutable, the one stable truth of every universe Stan knows. “So I just have to get in, right?” He wraps a hand around the exposed frame of an old Camaro, T-tops long gone and the interior left exposed.

The voice doesn’t answer that one, though Stan gets the feeling it’s waiting for him to make a choice, take a step, _something_. The door of the car won’t open, no matter how hard he pulls, rust overtaking paint that’s dulled to grey and freezing door shut, but this is The One. The one that makes him feel like he can stand up at his bar mitzvah and declare that he’s _a Loser and always fucking will be_ , or like he can walk down into the sewers and kill a killer clown, or like he can pick up the phone and get in the car, for real this time. So he jumps in through the top, something that probably would have been easier when he was fifteen and the car was new, but he makes it – the upholstery crackles beneath his thighs.

There’s an immediate shift in the air – the cold changes to a staticky feeling under his sternum, like touching the electric fences on the Hanlon farm, or shocking yourself on a radio dial. There’s a gasp, and Stan reaches over instinctively to grip the arm that _pulls_ him into a hug from the passenger seat.

The Losers Club leave Richie alone after Patty manages to work her way out from under his sleeping head and relax him down to lay flat on the bed in the room he’d been assigned. A tense air sits over them, even though they’re chatting normally, those who grew up there filling Patty in on all the stories she hadn’t been able to hear yet.

“So,” Bill says at length, finishing a turn pacing the room, “Richie wasn’t very clear on the plan, was he.”

“I think we’ve just gotta trust him, Bill,” Bev says from where she and Ben have commandeered the loveseat, her legs draped across his lap and his arm around her shoulders. “He said we had to come back, so we came back. Rich clearly knows things we don’t about the situation.”

Bill shakes his head, frustrated. “You don’t think,” he says, voice pitching up just a bit, “that it’s just a little weird that whatever is happening made us come back to Derry? _Again?_ ”

Mike leans forward from a sofa and catches Bill’s hand as he paces back past. “I think Richie’s the one who’s experiencing this,” he tells Bill gently, tugging at his arm until he relents and sits tensely down. Bill’s drawn up like a piano wire; Mike smooths a hand over his shoulders until, minutely, they ease. “He’s a goofball, but he’s not an idiot.” He ignores Beverly’s little grin and slowly rising eyebrows in favor of locking eyes with Ben, who’s nodding along as Mike speaks.

“I think Mike’s right. We read a lot of weird shit, but I don’t think it was all entirely credible, and Richie seems to know what he’s getting himself into.” He glances at Patty. “He’s been different since last time we were here. More serious, right?”

Patty nods too, quietly, lost in thought of the Richie she’s known for the last few months versus what their friends have just told her about his childhood self, or even the man who arrived in Derry (but not the one who left it). “Yes,” she agrees.

It is 11:59 p.m., which is a deeply ridiculous time to be rolling over and jamming dirty glasses (how? He doesn’t remember taking them off) onto his face – but there he is. Richie doesn't register the drum of the rain after his eyes focus; even with the glasses, things are still blurred with uneasy sleep and unconscious tears.

He shoots bolt upright when, even in the dark, he recognizes the dim figure sitting next to him on the town house bed, staring at its own hands and trembling slightly. Without hesitation, he catches the figure up in a crushing hug, relief washing over him in waves.

“Stan,” he says, almost unbelieving. “Stan, holy fuck, it worked.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> now with 100% more Stan! :D 
> 
> as always, i've been fleuresty and i Cannot shut up. i'm honored that you took time out of your day to read this. you are a gem of a person even if you didn't read this and you just skipped down here for the warnings. i love you just the same and want you to take care of yourself. if there's a warning i missed you think it would be best to include, please let me know.
> 
> there's still a [playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4zEouIefpNFfPxyo5Q8lo2?si=gQiGJKW4RGmYs8ee6c-Dug) for this fic on my spotify, and i'm still yelling into the void over on [twitter](https://www.twitter.com/fortheworlds) @fortheworlds, where you can always come find me to yell, yodel, or talk about the things you like.
> 
> warnings:  
> -Richie thinks of Bev as "emotional superglue" holding him together and has thoughts that what she might need is actually to "melt him down" into a headstone for Eddie.  
> -Richie wakes from one of the dreams and immediately runs to the bathroom, where he repeatedly retches.  
> -Stan contemplates a failed suicide attempt following Mike's call. He is able to call 911 and is taken to the hospital. It's noted that there's no Patricia to answer the phone when the Losers call due to her offscreen death in a car accident (sorry!!! i could not leave a Patty without a Stan so i needed a Stan with no Patty) and Stan's hospital stay.

**Author's Note:**

> Yeah, so. This has been a vehicle for the worldbuilding I made up after passing that exact "best grandpa" sign while on a run over a month ago. Chapter 2 will be coming soon, hopefully!  
> A playlist is available for this fic! I'm not gonna lie to you, it was mostly me listening to the Lord Huron bit for two weeks and then realizing that wasn't a super thorough mix. You can find that [here.](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4zEouIefpNFfPxyo5Q8lo2?si=gQiGJKW4RGmYs8ee6c-Dug)


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